Bouncy Ball 3D and Taking KDE to the Pyramids

During this year's Akademy, while celebrating KDE's 30th birthday, I found some time to do some hacking on a beloved old toy widget: the Bouncy Ball I used to maintain for a while, and which Filip recently made available for Plasma 6 again.

The all-new Bouncy Ball 3D - find it on the KDE Store (and by extension your Plasma's Add Widgets dialog) now - adds high-quality 3D graphics, more expressive physics with satisfying ball squish, and better support for living in and launching from a Plasma panel.

I have of course coordinated this with Filip a bit, and we agreed it's better to make this a seperate widget/release for now to keep the classic ball available for its fans.

Note the new widget requires at least KDE Frameworks 6.26+, i.e. around the Plasma 6.7 timeframe.

Enjoy the bounce!

While you bounce about, consider watching my Akademy 2026 presentation on taking KDE to the Great Pyramid in Egypt for high-tech archeological research.